The editorial in full:

Published: March 1, 2010

President Obama gave immigration reform only one vague sentence in his State of the Union address. Despite that, and the poisonous stalemate on Capitol Hill, the White House and Democratic Congressional leaders insist that they are still committed to presenting a comprehensive reform bill this year — one that would clamp down on the border and workplace, streamline legal immigration and bring 12 million illegal immigrants out of the shadows.

The country needs to confront the issue, to lift the fear that pervades immigrant communities, to better harness the energy of immigrant workers, to protect American workers from off-the-books competition. What’s been happening as the endless wait for reform drags on has been ugly.

The administration has doubled down on the Bush-era enforcement strategy, unleashing the Border Patrol, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and local law enforcement agencies and setting loose an epidemic of misery, racial profiling and needless arrests. The intense campaign of raids and deportations has so clogged the immigration courts that the American Bar Association has proposed creating an independent court system that presumably would be better able to command adequate resources.

Tensions and anger in immigrant communities are rising. Religious and business groups are urging change — for moral reasons and because they believe that bringing immigrants out from the shadows would help the economy. Young students who have patiently waited for the Dream Act — a bill to legalize immigrant children who bear no blame for their status — are frustrated. Groups across the country are planning to march on Washington this month, demanding action on reform.

At least one advocacy group, the Irish Lobby for Immigration Reform, has declared the dream of comprehensive reform dead. It is urging incremental change, with modest reforms like the Dream Act. Other groups may follow. It is too soon to give up.

Representative Luis Gutierrez has submitted legislation in the House that contains the right elements of comprehensive reform. Senators Charles Schumer and Lindsey Graham are working on a Senate version. Let’s hope Congress and Mr. Obama are paying attention and will find the spine to fashion a fair, comprehensive bill and then fight for it.

Mr. Obama should remember the promise he made often during the campaign but left out of his State of the Union: that the undocumented deserve a chance to make Americans of themselves.

An article from the Boston Globe:

By Kay Lazar, Globe Staff

A state law that excludes more than 26,000 legal immigrants from health coverage is unconstitutional and should be struck down, according to an unusual class action lawsuit filed today by several of the affected immigrants.

The lawsuit charges that the state's Connector Authority and its executive director, Jon Kingsdale, violated the immigrants' equal protection under the law last year when the administrators cut their health coverage in the Commonwealth Care program because of a tight state budget.

The Connector oversees the state's 2006 landmark health law that created Commonwealth Care, a state-subsidized program for low-income residents.

"You can't violate people's constitutional rights, just because you don’t have the funds," said Matt Selig, executive director of Health Law Advocates, a Boston-based public interest law firm that is assisting the immigrants in the suit.

Last year, the immigrants lost their coverage in Commonwealth Care, after lawmakers eliminated $130 million in funding to help balance the state’s budget. The Legislature ultimately restored about a third of the money, and the immigrants were given stripped-down health care plans, with significantly higher copayments for medications and other treatments.

Selig said the immigrants have taken the unusual step of filing the case directly with a single justice of the Supreme Court, because the urgency and broad impact mandate immediate review of the legal questions involved.

Eva Millona, executive director of the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition, said it was unfortunate that immigrants have to sue the state, especially because Governor Deval Patrick and his administration have fought hard to retain coverage for the group. But she said the immigrants could not legally sue the Legislature, which is the body that voted to cut their health coverage.

"These people are their neighbors, they pay taxes, they are part of the fabric, but they are being separated because of their immigration status," she said.

Dick Powers, a spokesman for the Connector, said the authority had no comment on the lawsuit.

It took seven years for this elemental matter of employer accountability to be established. This is a case study of the law’s delay in righting the scales of justice.

Roberto Ceniceros reported on this case in Business Insurance.

The article in full:

Migrant worker's injury in company housing ruled compensable

By Roberto Ceniceros

COLUMBIA, S.C.—A fractured ankle a migrant worker received while living in employer-provided housing arose in the course of employment and is compensable, the South Carolina Supreme Court has ruled.

The Tuesday decision in Frantz Pierre vs. Seaside Farms Inc. and American Home Insurance Co. overturned rulings by the South Carolina Workers' Compensation Commission and a circuit court, which decided that Mr. Pierre's 2003 ankle injury was not compensable because he was not at work.

The accident occurred the evening before his first day of work.

The commission and lower court also found that the seasonal worker hired to perform duties in a packing house was not required to live in the employer-provided housing, which court documents describe as a tin-roofed barracks.

But the South Carolina Supreme Court disagreed in remanding the case for further proceedings.

It said that Mr. Pierre' injury, which occurred when he fell on a sidewalk where water was flowing from an outdoor sink used to wash clothes, occurred as a result of a hazard on his employer's property.

“Thus, the source of the injury was a risk associated with the conditions under which the employees were required to live,” the state Supreme Court ruled. It also said Mr. Pierre essentially was required to live on the grounds because he and other migrant workers employed by Seaside “did not earn enough to obtain housing, and short-term rentals that coincided with the time they would be in the area did not exist.”

In addition, the nature of the job required workers to live near the packing facility and the living arrangement was convenient for the employer's work schedule that varied with weather and crop conditions.

In reaching its conclusion, the South Carolina Supreme Court cited similar decisions in Florida, New Mexico and Oregon that relied on a “bunkhouse rule.”

“We find the reasoning in these cases persuasive and that they represent the modern view in employee-residence jurisprudence,” the South Carolina high court ruled.

The bunkhouse rule requires compensating employees who are injured while on an employer's premises if an employment contract or the necessity of work requires them to be there. The rule generally requires contemplating whether an employee's use of the premises constitutes a portion of their compensation, court records state.

The Haitian immigrant population in the United States has continued to grow since 2000, although at a slower rate. Recent natural disasters in Central America and the Caribbean have pushed large numbers of migrants to the United States and in the wake of the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti, emigration pressures from the devastated country are likely to grow.

The Haitian diaspora in the United States has also traditionally played an important role in assisting Haiti recover from natural disasters. More than half of all Haitian immigrants resided in just two states, Florida and New York, although they are also concentrated in New Jersey and Massachusetts.

Haitian immigrant women were more likely to participate in the civilian labor force than foreign-born women overall.
In 2008, Haitian-born women age 16 and older (71.7 percent) were more likely to participate in the civilian labor force than all foreign-born women (57.1 percent) overall. Haitian-born men were about equally as likely to be in the civilian labor force (80.7 percent) as foreign-born men overall (80.6 percent).

Nearly half of employed Haitian-born men worked in services or in construction, extraction, and transportation.

Among the 168,000 Haitian-born male workers age 16 and older employed in the civilian labor force in 2008, 26.1 percent reported working in services and 22.3 percent reported working in construction, extraction, or transportation (see Table 2). By contrast, among the 13.6 million foreign-born male workers age 16 and older employed in the civilian labor force in 2008, 17.4 percent reported working in services and 25.9 percent reported working in construction, extraction, or transportation.

Over one of every four employed Haitian-born women worked in healthcare support.
Among the 182,000 Haitian-born female workers age 16 and older employed in the civilian labor force in 2008, 27.2 percent reported working in healthcare support occupations and 22.7 percent reported working in service occupations (see Table 2). By contrast, among the 9.5 million foreign-born female workers age 16 and older employed in the civilian labor force in 2008, 5.4 percent reported working in healthcare support and 25.7 percent reported working in service occupations.

Haitian immigrants were less likely to live in poverty than other immigrant groups.
The poverty rate among Haitian immigrant families was 12.9 percent in 2008, lower than the poverty rate among all foreign born families (14.9 percent). The difference was even larger among immigrant families headed by a female householder with no spouse present. Among Haitian immigrant households headed by a female with no husband present, the poverty rate was 20.8 percent in 2008, compared to 30.7 percent for all immigrants.

Legal and Unauthorized Haitian Immigrant Population

There were about 230,000 Haitian lawful permanent residents (LPRs) in 2008.
There were about 230,000 Haitian-born lawful permanent residents (LPRs) in the United States in 2008, about 1.8 percent of the estimated total 12.6 million LPRs.

Based on the 2000 Census, the federal government estimated that there were 76,000 unauthorized Haitian immigrants living in the United States.

The most recent published estimates from the Department of Homeland Security, based on analysis of the 2000 Census, suggest that the unauthorized immigrant population from Haiti grew from 67,000 in 1990 to 76,000 in 2000. Haitians accounted for 1.1 percent of all unauthorized immigrants in the United States in 2000, the 11th-largest unauthorized immigrant group in the country.

In particular, those from Mexico and Central America have been affected disproportionately. Many worked in the construction industry, which started collapsing after the housing bubble burst in late 2006.

In addition, many recent refugees, including those from Iraq, have struggled to find work due to the recession. Their precarious situation prompted advocacy groups to criticize the funding of US refugee resettlement programs and to point to the lack of sensitivity shown to this group's vulnerability during an economic downturn.

These impacts have been lessened to some extent by the fact that immigrants are generally more flexible about changing jobs and geographic locations than are native-born workers.

The sluggish economy has also made the United States less attractive for those seeking economic opportunities. Data suggest that immigration to the United States began to slow in late 2007 and that flows of unauthorized immigrants have decreased significantly.

However, there is no evidence that the recession has caused a substantial wave of returns to Mexico. Over the last year, the size of the unauthorized population, of which the largest share (59 percent) is Mexican, has decreased only slightly, from an estimated 12.1 million in July 2008 to 11.9 million in August 2009.

In an interesting twist, anecdotal evidence suggests that some Mexican families have sent money to support their family members in the United States.

Another impact of the recession has been decreased demand for H-1B temporary visas for highly skilled workers. In previous years, the 65,000 cap has been reached within the first few days the visas become available (see Figure 4). The cap for fiscal year 2010 was not met until December 21, 2009 — nearly nine months after employers were eligible to file fiscal year 2010 petitions.

The program even provides medical care to illegal immigrants.

The January 2010 report’s title is “Protection through Integration: The Mexican Government’s Efforts to Aid Migrants in the United States”

The report’s executive summary (further below in full): says:

“In recent years, the Mexican government has moved beyond traditional notions of consular protection by establishing a broad institutional structure, the Institute of Mexicans Abroad (Instituto de los Mexicanos en el Exterior or IME), to deliver an array of civic, health, education, and financial services to its migrants — 95 percent of whom live in the United States.”

Also,

“While evaluations of IME’s programs remain scarce, its projects offer a number of potential best practices in areas ranging from distance learning, outreach, civic engagement, and health care. We recommend sustaining and broadening evaluation and assessment of these programs. This is especially critical as other sending countries, such as Ecuador, Bolivia, Uruguay, and Paraguay, look to Mexico as a model for providing services to its diaspora and other recipient countries look to work with sending countries to make migration work for all participants.”

The Executive Summary in full:

Mexican consular officials safeguard and protect the interests of their nationals in the United States, performing many of the same functions as any other diplomatic staff in a foreign country. As an immigrant-sending country, Mexico also offers its nationals in the United States low-cost transfer rates for remittances and programs that match migrant investment in communities of origin dollar for dollar.

The proximity and concentration of their diaspora allows Mexico to establish or coordinate programs geared towards helping Mexican migrants transition to life in the United States. By promoting services that seek to integrate its migrants in a receiving country, the Mexican government has taken on a task that has traditionally been the work of receiving-country institutions, not sending countries.

IME’s work represents one of the most significant, if overlooked, factors in US immigrant integration policy. This report does not evaluate IME programs but rather seeks to detail its activities in a first-ever attempt to map the expanding array of IME programs within the United States.

The United States and Mexico have an important stake in the success of a shared population whose demography poses several challenges to immigrant integration in the United States. Mexican immigrants disproportionately have lower educational attainment, lack English proficiency, lack access to quality health care, and are more likely to work in low-wage, unskilled occupations that do not offer health insurance but may expose many to unsafe working conditions.

In addition, the large Mexican unauthorized population and recently arrived legal immigrants remain outside the US social safety net. Mexican immigrants may be left especially vulnerable in this economy as they are concentrated in industries — including construction, manufacturing, leisure, and hospitality — that are struggling through the recession. With limited evidence of return migration, Mexican immigrants increasingly will need assistance to succeed socially and economically.

Driven in part by the opportunity and necessity of supporting a shared population of adults and children, IME has set in motion a range of immigrant integration practices to help Mexican immigrants succeed in the United States. IME’s approach is based on a belief that a better integrated immigrant — one who has access to quality K-12 or adult education, learns English, is healthy, understands his or her rights, and is politically active — benefits the individual immigrant, the sending country, and the receiving country.

In many cases, IME’s programs are binational civil- society collaborations between IME and US school districts, hospitals, universities, foundations, and community-based organizations that fill gaps in the social welfare system caused by funding shortfalls, lack of experience with migrant populations, eligibility requirements, or neglect.

These projects include:

• Creation of a unique model of binational civic engagement through the Advisory Council (Consejo Consultivo del IME), a migrant-elected, migrant-led council that focuses on the Mexican government’s policies vis-à-vis Mexicans abroad while serving the ancillary purpose of leadership development within diaspora communities.

• Transcript analysis and diagnostic assessments in Spanish for US school districts that need assistance determining the appropriate grade placement of Mexican migrant children to promote graduation and reduce dropouts.

• Provision of low-cost culturally and linguistically appropriate distance-learning instruction for Mexican immigrant adults that is aligned with instruction received in the home country.

• Establishment of in-consulate medical stations (Ventanillas de Salud) where unauthorized immigrants and their families can receive basic medical information.

• Provision of financial literacy workshops that encourage the use of formal banking institutions in order to build sufficient credit history in the United States to qualify for a home or car loan.

In some cases, IME serves as the implementing agency for the program, but in other cases it serves a coordinating role between appropriate government agencies.
IME’s policies and practices underscore a shift in the Mexican approach to its migrants, from relatively limited engagement with their diaspora to the creation of an institution that cultivates a formal relationship between Mexico and its migrants in the United States. This shift can be seen in the evolution of its consular offices as they become important service delivery sites and coordinating entities for immigrant integration. This development coincides with an increase in the number of Mexican immigrants in the United States and the expansion of Mexican consular offices in the United States over the last decade to meet their needs.

While evaluations of IME’s programs remain scarce, its projects offer a number of potential best practices in areas ranging from distance learning, outreach, civic engagement, and health care. We recommend sustaining and broadening evaluation and assessment of these programs. This is especially critical as other sending countries, such as Ecuador, Bolivia, Uruguay, and Paraguay, look to Mexico as a model for providing services to its diaspora and other recipient countries look to work with sending countries to make migration work for all participants.

As reported by WorkCompCentral (subscription required) Angel Miranda was injured in July 2008. His employer paid him under the table for his disability.

When the employer stopped its payments, he filed a workers compensation claim. Only problem: he had no formal record of having earned a wage, presumably he had been paid in cash, and to award disability benefits a worker has to show evidence of what he was paid. Miranda tried to remedy the situation by filing in April 2009 a tax return for 2008. A workers compensation judge awarded Miranda disability benefits; the decision was upheld of appeal.

Whether he was later deported or not the news article did not say.

The article:

Illegal Alien's Tax Return Entitled Him to Benefits:

An illegal alien's filing of a tax return with the Internal Revenue Service entitled him to workers' compensation benefits, Florida's 1st District Court of Appeal ruled.

Case: JBD Brother's and Masonry Inc., et al. v. Miranda, No. 1D09-3402, 1/25/10, published.

Facts: Angel Miranda was an illegal alien from Mexico who has lived in the United States since 2000. In 2008, he began working as a forklift driver and laborer for JBD Brother's and Masonry. Miranda was injured in July 2008, when he fell from a scaffold at the employer's job site in Miami.

The employer failed to immediately report the accident to its workers' compensation carrier, and instead, agreed to make "under the table" payments for Miranda's medical care and lost time until he recuperated. When the employer halted the payments in September 2008, Miranda retained an attorney and filed a petition for benefits.

The employer responded by reporting the accident to its carrier, which accepted the accident and injury as compensable. However, the carrier denied indemnity benefits because there was no record of Miranda ever having reported his wages to the Internal Revenue Service.

In April 2009, Miranda and his attorney filed forms reporting his 2008 income to the IRS, and seeking an individual taxpayer identification number.

Procedural History: The parties stipulated that Miranda's reported income equated to an average weekly wage of $480. However, the employer argued that because Miranda failed to file the correct forms with complete information to the IRS, he failed to properly report his income and therefore failed to establish his wages for purposes of calculating an AWW.

The judge of compensation claims rejected this argument, and awarded temporary total disability benefits.

The appellate judges concluded that Miranda was entitled to workers' compensation benefits despite the allegation that his tax return may have had some technical flaws. The court based this upon another Jan. 25, 2010, decision, which is named Rene Stone Work Corp. v. Gonzalez.

In that decision, the court concluded that an employee simply needs to report his or her income to the IRS to become entitled to benefits, and rejected arguments that the tax return needs to be technically precise.

Source: WorkCompCentral

I hope this leads to $100 million in payments to grieving family survivors.

The article in full:

Officials Hid Truth About Immigrant Deaths in Jail
By NINA BERNSTEIN

Silence has long shrouded the men and women who die in the nation’s immigration jails. For years, they went uncounted and unnamed in the public record. Even in 2008, when The New York Times obtained and published a federal government list of such deaths, few facts were available about who these people were and how they died.

But behind the scenes, it is now clear, the deaths had already generated thousands of pages of government documents, including scathing investigative reports that were kept under wraps, and a trail of confidential memos and BlackBerry messages that show officials working to stymie outside inquiry.

The documents, obtained over recent months by The Times and the American Civil Liberties Union under the Freedom of Information Act, concern most of the 107 deaths in detention counted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement since October 2003, after the agency was created within the Department of Homeland Security.

The Obama administration has vowed to overhaul immigration detention, a haphazard network of privately run jails, federal centers and county cells where the government holds noncitizens while it tries to deport them.

But as the administration moves to increase oversight within the agency, the documents show how officials — some still in key positions — used their role as overseers to cover up evidence of mistreatment, deflect scrutiny by the news media or prepare exculpatory public statements after gathering facts that pointed to substandard care or abuse.

As one man lay dying of head injuries suffered in a New Jersey immigration jail in 2007, for example, a spokesman for the federal agency told The Times that he could learn nothing about the case from government authorities. In fact, the records show, the spokesman had alerted those officials to the reporter’s inquiry, and they conferred at length about sending the man back to Africa to avoid embarrassing publicity.

In another case that year, investigators from the agency’s Office of Professional Responsibility concluded that unbearable, untreated pain had been a significant factor in the suicide of a 22-year-old detainee at the Bergen County Jail in New Jersey, and that the medical unit was so poorly run that other detainees were at risk.

The investigation found that jail medical personnel had falsified a medication log to show that the detainee, a Salvadoran named Nery Romero, had been given Motrin. The fake entry was easy to detect: When the drug was supposedly administered, Mr. Romero was already dead.

Yet those findings were never disclosed to the public or to Mr. Romero’s relatives on Long Island, who had accused the jail of abruptly depriving him of his prescription painkiller for a broken leg. And an agency supervisor wrote that because other jails were “finicky” about accepting detainees with known medical problems like Mr. Romero’s, such people would continue to be placed at the Bergen jail as “a last resort.”

In a recent interview, Benjamin Feldman, a spokesman for the jail, which housed 1,503 immigration detainees last year, would not say whether any changes had been made since the death.

In February 2007, in the case of the dying African man, the immigration agency’s spokesman for the Northeast, Michael Gilhooly, rebuffed a Times reporter’s questions about the detainee, who had suffered a skull fracture at the privately run Elizabeth Detention Center in New Jersey. Mr. Gilhooly said that without a full name and alien registration number for the man, he could not check on the case.

But, records show, he had already filed a report warning top managers at the federal agency about the reporter’s interest and sharing information about the injured man, a Guinean tailor named Boubacar Bah. Mr. Bah, 52, had been left in an isolation cell without treatment for more than 13 hours before an ambulance was called.

While he lay in the hospital in a coma after emergency brain surgery, 10 agency managers in Washington and Newark conferred by telephone and e-mail about how to avoid the cost of his care and the likelihood of “increased scrutiny and/or media exposure,” according to a memo summarizing the discussion.

One option they explored was sending the dying man to Guinea, despite an e-mail message from the supervising deportation officer, who wrote, “I don’t condone removal in his present state as he has a catheter” and was unconscious. Another idea was renewing Mr. Bah’s canceled work permit in hopes of tapping into Medicaid or disability benefits.

Eventually, faced with paying $10,000 a month for nursing home care, officials settled on a third course: “humanitarian release” to cousins in New York who had protested that they had no way to care for him. But days before the planned release, Mr. Bah died.

Among the participants in the conferences was Nina Dozoretz, a longtime manager in the agency’s Division of Immigration Health Services who had won an award for cutting detainee health care costs. Later she was vice president of the Nakamoto Group, a company hired by the Bush administration to monitor detention. The Obama administration recently rehired her to lead its overhaul of detainee health care.

Asked about the conference call on Mr. Bah, Ms. Dozoretz said: “How many years ago was that? I don’t recall all the specifics if indeed there was a call.” She added, “I advise you to contact our public affairs office.” Mr. Gilhooly, the spokesman who had said he had no information on the case, would not comment.

On the day after Mr. Bah’s death in May 2007, Scott Weber, director of the Newark field office of the immigration enforcement agency, recommended in a memo that the agency take the unusual step of paying to send the body to Guinea for burial, to prevent his widow from showing up in the United States for a funeral and drawing news coverage.

Mr. Weber wrote that he believed the agency had handled Mr. Bah’s case appropriately. “However,” he added, “I also don’t want to stir up any media interest where none is warranted.” Helping to bury Mr. Bah overseas, he wrote, “will go a long way to putting this matter to rest.”

In the agency’s confidential files was a jail video showing Mr. Bah face down in the medical unit, hands cuffed behind his back, just before medical personnel sent him to a disciplinary cell. The tape shows him crying out repeatedly in his native Fulani, “Help, they are killing me!”

Almost a year after his death, the agency quietly closed the case without action. But Mr. Bah’s name had shown up on the first list of detention fatalities, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, and on May 5, 2008, his death was the subject of a front-page article in The Times.

Brian P. Hale, a spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said in an interview that the newly disclosed records represented the past, and that the agency’s new leaders were committed to transparency and greater oversight, including prompt public disclosure and investigation of every death, and more attention to detainee care in a better-managed system.

But the most recent documents show that the culture of secrecy has endured. And the past cover-ups underscore what some of the agency’s own employees say is a central flaw in the proposed overhaul: a reliance on the agency to oversee itself.

“Because ICE investigates itself there is no transparency and there is no reform or improvement,” Chris Crane, a vice president in the union that represents employees of the agency’s detention and removal operations, told a Congressional subcommittee on Dec. 10.

The agency has kept a database of detention fatalities at least since December 2005, when a National Public Radio investigation spurred a Congressional inquiry. In 2006, the agency issued standard procedures for all such deaths to be reported in detail to headquarters.

But internal documents suggest that officials were intensely concerned with controlling public information. In April 2007, Marc Raimondi, then an agency spokesman, warned top managers that a Washington Post reporter had asked about a list of 19 deaths that the civil liberties union had compiled, and about a dying man whose penile cancer had spread after going undiagnosed in detention, despite numerous medical requests for a biopsy.

“These are quite horrible medical stories,” Mr. Raimondi wrote, “and I think we’ll need to have a pretty strong response to keep this from becoming a very damaging national story that takes on long legs.”

That response was an all-out defense of detainee medical care over several months, including statistics that appeared to show that mortality rates in detention were declining, and were low compared with death rates in prisons.

Experts in detention health care called the comparison misleading; it also came to light that the agency was undercounting the number of detention deaths, as well as discharging some detainees shortly before they died. In August, litigation by the civil liberties union prompted the Obama administration to disclose that more than one in 10 immigrant detention deaths had been overlooked and omitted from a list submitted to Congress last year.

Two of those deaths had occurred in Arizona, in 2004 and 2007, at the Eloy Detention Center, run by the Corrections Corporation of America. Eloy had nine known fatalities — more than any other immigration jail under contract to the federal government. But Immigration and Customs Enforcement was still secretive. When a reporter for The Arizona Republic asked about the circumstances of those deaths, an agency spokesman told him the records were unavailable.

According to records The Times obtained in December, one Eloy detainee who died, in October 2008, was Emmanuel Owusu. An ailing 62-year-old barber who had arrived from Ghana on a student visa in 1972, he had been a legal permanent resident for 33 years, mostly in Chicago. Immigration authorities detained him in 2006, based on a 1979 conviction for misdemeanor battery and retail theft.

“I am confused as to how subject came into our custody???” the Phoenix field office director, Katrina S. Kane, wrote to subordinates. “Convicted in 1979? That’s a long time ago.”

In response, a report on his death was revised to refer to Mr. Owusu’s “lengthy criminal history ranging from 1977 to 1998.” It did not note that except for the battery conviction, that history consisted mostly of shoplifting offenses.

A diabetic with high blood pressure, he had been detained for two years at Eloy while he battled

“Only 4.3% of Los Angeles respondents who had experienced a serious on-the-job injury during the previous three years had filed a workers' compensation claim to pay for medical care or missed days of work, the study found.”

The article in full:
By Patrick J. McDonnell

January 6, 2010

Low-wage workers in the Los Angeles area are even more likely than their counterparts in New York and Chicago to suffer violations of minimum wage, overtime and other labor laws, according to a new UCLA study being released today.

The study found that almost nine out of 10 low-wage workers surveyed in Los Angeles County had recently experienced some form of pay-related workplace violation, or "wage theft." Almost one in three reported being paid less than the minimum wage and nearly 80% said they had not received legally mandated overtime.

"We knew these violations were happening, but we never really imagined it was as prevalent as this study demonstrates," said Ruth Milkman, a sociologist and principal author of the study, conducted by UCLA's Institute for Research on Labor and Employment.

The authors described the study as a ground-breaking effort to quantify the plight of a vulnerable, largely immigrant population that is often missed in standard surveys.

Los Angeles employees also reported working off the clock, not receiving proper meal and rest breaks, being forced to work despite injuries and facing retaliation from employers for complaining or trying to start a union. Almost one in five Los Angeles restaurant employees and others receiving tips reported that employers or supervisors illegally pocketed all or part of their tips.

The study found that small and large employers across a broad swath of industries in Los Angeles County regularly violated labor laws. "These problems are not limited to the underground economy or to a few bad apples," the report said.

Gary Toebben, president of the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce, said he had not seen the study, but that the vast majority of area employers comply with all state and federal labor laws. "We do not condone any employers who do not comply with the law," Toebben said.

The report is part of a larger study, released last year, that examined the predicament of low-wage workers in Los Angeles, Chicago and New York. The new report focuses on Los Angeles County, home of the nation's largest population of undocumented workers.

"In nearly every case," the study stated, "the violation rates are higher in Los Angeles than in New York and Chicago."

The reason for the pervasiveness of abuses here, the authors said, is that certain sectors of the Los Angeles economy, including garment manufacturing and residential construction, have embraced business strategies that involve widespread violation of labor laws. Although all three cities have large immigrant populations, few low-wage workers in Los Angeles have union representation, and many work in service industries or in apparel manufacturing. But proponents of immigration restrictions argue that the very presence of so many illegal immigrants creates a climate of exploitation.

"Obviously, the fact that so many of these workers are in the country illegally does provide unscrupulous employers the opportunity to take advantage," said Ira Mehlman, a spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform.

The study also suggests that low-wage workers in Los Angeles County seldom benefit from the legally mandated workers' compensation system for employees who become sick or injured on the job.

Only 4.3% of Los Angeles respondents who had experienced a serious on-the-job injury during the previous three years had filed a workers' compensation claim to pay for medical care or missed days of work, the study found. Whether this is because employers didn't have the mandated coverage, didn't inform employees or pressured workers not to file was unclear, Milkman said.

The study, which took five years, involved detailed interviews in 2008 with 1,815 workers in Los Angeles County, all from low-wage professions, where average salaries were close to $8 an hour. Those surveyed included garment workers, domestics, restaurant employees, janitors and construction workers.

The surveyed population is representative of about 17% of all workers in Los Angeles County, or almost 750,000 people, the study said. More than half of the participants (56.4%) were undocumented immigrants -- a fact that created a vulnerability exploited by employers, the study said. The great majority, almost 75%, were Latino. Almost 60% said they had less than a high school education.

patrick.mcdonnell@latimes.com

Immigration’s New Year

Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York City, at his inauguration, pledged to help the Obama administration pass immigration reform. Mr. Bloomberg is a force to reckon with, as he proved with his national campaign against illegal guns. On the same day, four young people in Miami, current or former students at Miami Dade College, began their own determined march to Washington in an effort to bring pressure from the grass roots.

Three of the four were brought to this country illegally as children. Like thousands of other young people, they bear no blame for their status, and they are frustrated that their hard work and bright promise lead to a brick wall. Their protest for a chance to become Americans is courageous because it exposes them to possible arrest and deportation. “We are risking our future because our present is unbearable,” one of them, Felipe Matos, told The Times.

The Obama administration has vowed to press ahead with reform this year. Given the hard economic times, the politics may be bleaker even than in 2007 when reform was scuttled in an ugly battle. The need is just as real — for the undocumented and for the country.

America needs to shut the path to illegal entry and employment while opening smoother and more rational routes to legal immigration. Opponents of reform say the downturn is a terrible time to fix the system, but they are wrong. When the recovery comes, the country will need a functioning system more than ever — one that encourages legal entry and bolsters all workers’ rights.

To do this, the country needs to bring its huge undocumented underclass into the light. This means putting 12 million people on a path to being assimilated. It is not a question of adding new people to the work force; they are here, many helping keep the economy afloat while tolerating low pay and abuse from lawbreaking employers who prefer them to American workers.

Representative Luis Gutierrez, a Democrat of Illinois, already has offered a sensible bill that legalizes immigrants who show that they have been employed, pay a $500 fine, learn English and undergo a criminal background check, among other things.

Opponents will try their best to scuttle reform by claiming to be open to compromise while they insist on prohibitive fees, penalties and requirements that turn the path into a fiction — not a wait of months but of decades or never. That is not reform. And it won’t solve the problem.

After years of tightening the screws, the system is hopelessly frozen. Those who want to fix it will have to shut out the choruses of no-amnestys and over-my-dead-bodys, sidestep the false arguments and press into the headwinds while holding firm to the core of the better solution. To legalize the undocumented, collect their unpaid taxes, free them to earn more and spend more, to get the immigrant escalator to the middle class moving again. The country needs it; the economy needs it; the immigrants need and deserve it.

“No city on earth has been more rewarded by immigrant labor, more renewed by immigrant ideas, more revitalized by immigrant culture,” Mr. Bloomberg said of New York City last week. Substitute “country” in that sentence, as in America, and it is every bit as true.

A local governing board unanimously enacted a law which fines businesses for hiring and real estate owners from renting to illegal immigrants.

“A hamlet of about 8,000 situated across the Delaware River from Philadelphia, Riverside is just one of more than 30 small towns and suburbs across the country that have recently enacted immigration ordinances, including Escondido, Calif.; Farmers Branch, Texas; and Valley Park, Mo. At the same time, statewide laws that punish business owners for employing illegal immigrants have been passed in Arizona, Oklahoma, and South Carolina.”

The article in full:

How illegal immigration is dividing a town's business owners
In Riverside, N.J., a crackdown that drove away a third of the town's population has some businesses struggling to survive the loss.

RIVERSIDE, N.J. (FORTUNE Small Business) -- A barbershop quartet sings "The Girl From Ipanema" in Portuguese on a television dialed to a Brazilian satellite channel inside Pavilion Barbecue, where the air is piquant with the aroma of the house specialty, frango de churrasco - slow-roasted chicken braised in red chili sauce.

Since then, immigrants have fled Riverside in droves, and now there are more chickens turning on Martinez's rotisserie than customers sitting at her tables.

Riverside has become a microcosm of the raging national debate over immigration. Local residents who feared that the character and culture of their town were being altered for the worse joined forces with local business owners who resented rivals who hired cheap, illegal laborers and avoided paying their payroll taxes and workers' comp. Together this group clashed with the many small-business owners, such as Martinez, who argue that without immigrants Riverside's economy would wither.

'I can't grow my business': Employers struggle to hire skilled foreigners

A hamlet of about 8,000 situated across the Delaware River from Philadelphia, Riverside is just one of more than 30 small towns and suburbs across the country that have recently enacted immigration ordinances, including Escondido, Calif.; Farmers Branch, Texas; and Valley Park, Mo. At the same time, statewide laws that punish business owners for employing illegal immigrants have been passed in Arizona, Oklahoma, and South Carolina.

When Martinez, 52, opened Pavilion Barbecue in 2005, the township was enjoying a renaissance sparked by an influx of immigrants who were drawn to the area by abundant construction and service-sector jobs. Their presence began to reverse decades of blight in Riverside. Boarded-up storefronts reopened as coffeehouses, minimarts, music shops, nail salons, pharmacies, and restaurants.

Hundreds of residents gathered downtown in February 2006 to watch a wrecking ball destroy the W.F. Taubel Mill, a decrepit hosiery factory that was once Riverside's largest employer. The crowd cheered as the mill was razed to make way for a condominium project located along the new state-funded light-rail line.

"Riverside, the tide is turning and you are on the way up," proclaimed state senator Diane Allen as the dust settled. "Riverside is going to be a shining star once again."

But not everyone appreciated the demographic shift. Some business owners resented the thousands of Spanish-speaking newcomers, 80% of whom were in the county illegally, according to estimates by local officials. Joey Vento, owner of Geno's Steaks, a landmark South Philly cheese-steak joint established in 1966, donated $10,000 to a legal fund set up to support the nearby city of Hazleton, Pa., which passed the country's first anti-illegal-immigration law just weeks before Riverside.

"Business owners who support illegal immigration are short-sighted and unpatriotic," says Vento, 67. "Plus, they're cheaters. Any business that has to depend on illegals to survive is not a legitimate business, period."

Vento spoke out passionately in favor of Riverdale's ordinance, and the town council agreed, passing it in July 2006. Since then, town officials estimate, as many as 2,500 immigrants, or nearly one-third of Riverside's population, have fled. Downtown merchants and restaurateurs report declines in revenue of as much as 70%.

"Business was good before - very good," Martinez says. "Now it's down 50%. Every day I pray, but it's an uphill struggle."

Ironically, the Riverside ordinance was never actually enforced. It was almost immediately tied up in court after 62 Riverside business and property owners filed a lawsuit claiming that the Illegal Immigration Relief Act was unconstitutional and improperly superseded federal authority.

"The law basically forced local business owners to become enforcers of federal immigration policies, which I didn't appreciate," says Ed Robins, 53, who opened a musical instrument and record store in downtown Riverside in 2005. "I took less than a 20% hit. But I opposed [the ordinance] on principle."

Riverside officials spent $82,000 in attorney fees, forcing the delay of road-improvement projects and repairs to City Hall. It then became the nation's first town to rescind an immigration ordinance, in September 2007 - but only after a federal judge had struck down Hazleton's law. (Riverside Mayor Robert Conrad declined to comment for this article.)
Seasonal worker shortage: The $20 carnival ride

More recently, three federal judges issued separate rulings that shifted the momentum in favor of local immigration laws. Last December a federal judge in Oklahoma threw out a lawsuit against a statewide law that forbids hiring illegal immigrants. In January a Missouri judge ruled in favor of a local ordinance passed in Valley Park, a suburb of St. Louis, that fines and suspends the business licenses of those who fail to verify employees' immigration status. Then, in February, a federal judge in Arizona upheld a law that suspends for ten days the business license of any employer who hires an illegal immigrant, and then revokes it permanently on the second offense.

Even though the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, local chambers, and other business consortiums, such as farm bureaus and restaurant and hospitality associations, have consistently rallied against such laws, 32 state legislatures are considering sanctioning those who hire illegal immigrants.

The Greater Oklahoma City Chamber of Commerce is now dealing with the fallout on its economy. It estimates that 20% of the city's construction labor force - about 2,000 workers - has left the city in the past four months. More than 70 businesses closed in the first two months of 2008 because many of their employees left the state. In Tulsa, sales at small businesses in Latino areas have dropped by about 50%, and the Tulsa Metro Chamber of Commerce estimates that 15,000 to 25,000 Hispanic workers have left the area since the law passed.

"The Tulsa region was outpacing the rest of the nation in job growth," says Mike Neal, president of Tulsa's chamber. "This law requires our businesses to police immigration through an erroneous system and harms the ability of Oklahoma businesses to grow."

Back in Riverside, officials estimate that a few hundred Brazilians have returned to the town since its immigration ordinance was repealed, maybe more. It's hard to measure the influx; now more than ever, immigrants are keeping to the shadows.

"I rent out a one-bedroom apartment. Sometimes I see four or five pairs of shoes outside the door," says Doug Bell, 50, owner of a Riverside discount store as well as a commercial painting business and a residential leasing agency. "Their standard of living is different than ours. It's just a question of, if they're here to stay, are they going to eventually rise to our standard of living, or are they going to bring us down? Right now, all I know is I'm barely making it, and the Brazilians are good shoppers."

Most business owners seem to agree on one point: The U.S. needs a uniform national policy on immigration.

Says Robin Conrad, executive vice president of the National Chamber Litigation Center, the public-policy law firm of the U.S. Chamber: "This patchwork of inconsistent requirements is not the answer and will have a negative effect on the economy." To top of page

He writes that illegal immigrants add 0.03% to the gross domestic product, and cost 0.1% in educational and healthcare expenses (by far the leading economic burdens these worker households impose). This means they are a 0.7% drag on the economy, or about $10 billion. Border control expenses of the federal government is $9.5 billion.

He writes that they make up much of the ranks of poorly educated workers. “Over the last 50 years, the United States has raised the education level of its adult population dramatically. Whereas in 1960 half of US-born working-age adults had not completed high school, today the figure is just 8 percent….Forty- seven percent of unauthorized immigrants between 25 and 64 years of age have not completed the equivalent of a US high school education; they account for 20 percent of working-age adults in the United States with less than a high school degree.

“In 2008, they represented 25 percent of farm workers, 19 percent of building and maintenance staff, 17 percent of construction labor, 12 percent of employees in food preparation and serving, 10 percent of production labor, and 5 percent of the total civilian labor force.”

(These figures are from Jeffrey S. Passel and D’Vera Cohn, A Portrait of Unauthorized Immigrants in the United States (Washington, DC: Pew Hispanic Center, 2009).

Immigration Officials to Audit 1,000 More Companies

By NEIL A. LEWIS
Published: November 19, 2009

WASHINGTON — Immigration enforcement officials said Thursday that they were expanding a program for auditing companies that might have hired illegal immigrants and had notified 1,000 companies this week that they would have to undergo such a review.

John Morton, who heads Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known as ICE, announced the new initiative, saying it was part of the administration’s plan to deal with companies that hire illegal workers. “ICE is focused on finding and penalizing employers who believe they can unfairly get ahead by cultivating illegal workplaces,” Mr. Morton said.

He said that because the program was a law enforcement operation, he would not identify the companies that would undergo an audit except to say that they had been selected as a result of investigative leads and their connection to public safety and national security.

The language suggests the audits will affect private companies involved in infrastructure operations like gas and electric utilities and contractors on military bases but not retailers and manufacturers of nonessential goods.

The announcement of the action appears to be part of a two-pronged strategy by Homeland Security officials to crack down on companies that regularly rely on illegal workers while simultaneously trying to reward companies that are diligent in checking the documentation of prospective workers.

At a separate event on Thursday, Janet Napolitano, the secretary of Homeland Security, urged American consumers to favor companies that make efforts to ensure that they do not hire illegal immigrants.

To that end, Ms. Napolitano said that her department was permitting companies that use a new computerized system to check the legal status of employees to feature a special logo on their products and ads saying “I E-Verify.”

The E-Verify campaign allows employers to match a prospective candidate’s name against a database that combines several government lists, including Social Security, passport and border information.

The first audit conducted by ICE covered 654 companies and resulted in the filing of formal notices to seek a fine from 61. ICE officials said they were considering seeking fines from an additional 267 companies from that first audit.

An audit consists of ICE officials checking each worker’s Employee Eligibility Verification Form, known as an I-9, to determine what steps were taken to confirm the person was eligible to be hired. If irregularities are found, the companies may then be fined for lax monitoring.

The strategy is part of the Obama administration’s effort to reduce illegal immigration by forcing companies to fire unauthorized workers rather than by conducting raids at the workplace, actions that are often accompanied by great personal trauma, including deportation and the dividing of immigrant families.

Representative Lamar Smith of Texas, a leading Republican on immigration policy, on Thursday sharply criticized the administration’s approach. Mr. Smith said it was unwise to end “worksite enforcement” actions, or raids.

“The most effective means we have of making these jobs available to American citizens and legal immigrants is U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement worksite enforcement actions,” he said. “Each time ICE detains and deports an illegal immigrant worker, ICE creates a job for an American worker.”

The audits, however, have resulted in large-scale dismissals at the hands of employers, leaving the government one step removed.

In September, American Apparel, a clothing maker with a large garment factory in downtown Los Angeles, fired about 1,800 immigrant employees — more than a quarter of its work force — after a federal audit turned up irregularities in identity documents the workers presented when they were hired.